'Won't Back Down,' 2 stars

"Won't Back Down" is a Message movie with a capital M, and it delivers that message with all the nuance of a megaphone blast to the face. The issue at hand? Failing public schools and how to fix them. It's rich territory for human drama; unfortunately, the film is more interested in slapping a charter-school Band-Aid on the gushing wound than exploring dramatic possibilities.

'Won't Back Down'

Bad:

Director: Daniel Barnz.

Cast: Viola Davis, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Holly Hunter.

Rating: Rated PG for thematic elements and language.

Maggie Gyllenhaal plays a down-on-her-luck single mother juggling two jobs and struggling to provide for her bright but dyslexic daughter. Without enough money to attend private school, the little girl is left to wallow in a low-income public school, where the kids behave like monsters while the teachers yawn and shop for new boots online.

After going through all the proper channels to find help for her daughter and getting stonewalled by school officials at every turn, she tries her luck with Nona (Viola Davis), a teacher at the terrible school who seems to show some interest in the idea of reform. Nona has a slate of her own problems -- beaten down by school bureaucracy, she has lost her passion for teaching over the years, her marriage is failing and her son is struggling with school.

The two women team up to enact change and set their sights on local parent-trigger laws which -- long story short -- empower communities to take some control by privatizing the failing school if they can manage to jump through all the bureaucratic hoops and get enough of the parents and teachers on their side.

The biggest obstacle standing in the way of change? The teachers union, of course -- which is where this movie takes a tumble off the ideological deep end.

Whatever the issue, and whatever your politics, nobody likes to be told what to think, and "Won't Back Down" doesn't even dabble in nuance. Their pro-union foes positively spit and snarl as they scheme to shut down the parent-trigger action and preserve their control.

The film is at its best when it focuses on real-life human drama rooted in character: failing marriages, crushing poverty, professional malaise. Davis in particular delivers as impassioned a performance as ever -- good enough that you wish you could airlift her character into another movie. And it's heartening to see such a strong and varied female cast carry the weight of a movie that isn't a brainless, paint-by-numbers romantic comedy.

But oversimplified politics undermine the film at every turn. The shrill preachiness reaches a fever pitch by the film's climax, a schoolboard hearing that takes place under the watchful gazes of a muralized Abraham Lincoln and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and in which the deciding vote is cast by a man named -- what else? -- Mr. King, who monologues against a backdrop of the civil-rights leader to thunderous applause.

The movie doesn't just shriek its point to you through a megaphone -- it beats you over the head with it.

And it doesn't matter which side of the debate you land on; two hours of schmaltz mired in bloodless policy debate just doesn't make for good movie watching. Even if you stripped the film bare of political pretensions, you'd still be left with unabashed, hokey sentimentality where such feel-good adages as "Change the school, you change the neighborhood" are sprinkled on complex problems like so much fairy dust.

There's a real conversation to be had about the sorry state of the public-school system, but all this movie is going to trigger is a lot of screaming.

Reach the writer at barbara.vandenburgh@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-8371.